Arriving at work this morning I look at the poetry blogs, & see Kasey Mohammad's has this:

"In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry."

I was thinking about something like this walking in today (down Morris Ave, along Hope St - which runs between the posh prep school on one side & the "struggling" public Hope High on the other), as I was wondering what to say here this morning. . .

They say an artist shouldn't talk too much about their own work, but none of the hoary maxims seem to apply anyway when no one else talks about it either! So I'll try to say a little more about my long poem. Earlier on this blog I said something about poetry or art in general as a search for wholeness. I don't really buy the various doctrinal psychological &/or religious explanations that have been offered for this, but in my experience anyway something along those lines does seem to be the case. What seems least dubious to me, anyway, is a general philosophical notion of the Good or God as a goodness containing all things, and this is what we hunger for as an integral aspect of our nature, beneath particular satisfactions desires & consolations. A contemplative goal.

Anyway, how does this relate to Stubborn Grew & following? One way to approach this is to ask, who is this guy Bluejay?

Bluejay is a character in the narrative of Stubborn Grew. He epitomizes the marginal, the outcast, the rejected, and the powerful. He's a ghost &/or a man; he's African- or Native American or Cajun. He's Hermes to Henry's Orpheus or Virgil to Henry's Dante : at one point he retells (briefly) one of the "Bluejay" complex of tales from NW Coast tribes which are Orphic in nature (journeys to retrieve the living from the dead). (Bluejay is a trickster figure similar to Coyote on the NW Pacific Coast.)

In the process of "guiding" Henry, Bluejay serves to re-order the signals of epic. He plants an otherness there which parallels the imaginative "shape" of the world the epic represents (the culture & landscape of North America).

In a sense, Bluejay opens a door, leading down to more primal imaginative shapes or world-picturings. Wholeness (in the form of a mandala, for example) describes a way, pictures a way. The door Bluejay opens for Henry-narrator allows him to magnify what began simply as a note or an occasional poem in the first section of Stubborn Grew. I had written a memorial poem for my maternal uncle, James Ravlin, and followed it with one for his daughter Juliet, who committed suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday. When I wrote these sections I had not yet realized that the writing of this long poem was on a certain level integrating the Orpheus story with my own mourning for an adored cousin, and that the first sequel to Stubborn (Grassblade Light - described earlier here as an 8-sided formal structure) would take shape as a kind of healing mandala directed toward the suicides (Juliet; John Berryman - who died within sight of my grandparent's - Uncle Jim's parent's - house on the Mississippi; and Hart Crane). The mandala is also designed or ornamented as an Ojibwa midewe ceremony. The Ojibwa, living in the regions around the source of the Mississippi, developed this syncretic medicine ritual, incorporating songs & music, in the 18th-19th century. I adapted it in similar syncretic fashion to the form of the long poem.

These developments in the sequels to Stubborn Grew came as complete surprises to me. As I wrote earlier here on the blog, they were like the "rose" emerging out of the ashes of Stubborn. They were elaborations or flowerings of the orphic imbalance or disequilibrium - the love-relation as something lost or lacking. They parallel the "Russian" element in a different key. Each development - each new book in the long poem - strengthened or instigated what followed it. So that the 3rd large book of the poem - called "July" - incorporated all these elements in a textual vortex dominated by speed. "July" is a kind of symbolic manifestation of the poem as end-in-itself - the telos ("Forth of July" - the whole poem - is the coming-forth of "July") - as simultaneously analogous to the manifestation of the land, the continent, the nation (centered on the Mississippi River) - and leading, paradoxically, into a "Green Constellation" of deeper, more submerged levels of meaning & motivation.

These deeper levels - explored in the second part of "July" ("Green Constellation"), and in the gnomic coda to the entire poem (Book 4 - "Blackstone's Day-Book") related to the orphic journey in terms of both heaven & hell. On the "heavenly" level, the journey of Henry-narrator & Bluejay - from the Lenten un-building of Stubborn, to the Juliet-Beatrice-midewe medicine dance of Grassblade Light, to the continental instauration of July, leads toward a new manifestation of "J" - as Beatrice-figure, but also as Jerusalem & Jubilee. Jubilee is an image of world-renewal by means of divine justice or equilibrium. On the "hell" level, the closing parts of the poem intimate new sources and compulsions for the Lenten shriving "supervised" by Blackstone from the beginning. The poem in this way circles back on itself.

These notes, I suppose, appear garbled & arbitrary on the one hand, and overly-neat and -planned on the other, as well as irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read the poem. But the "plan" as described here is only an abstract. I haven't spoken about many other aspects, including perhaps the most important: the compositional process on the micro level of words & lines & stanzas. The "abba" quatrain provides a different matrix for approaching the whole experience & its possible meanings.